


Nostalgia Couldn't Take Care Of Its Own

by eye_of_a_cat



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Bad career moves, Bureaucracy, Drugs, Gambling, M/M, Pre-Canon, Psi Corps, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-14 23:12:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14779103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eye_of_a_cat/pseuds/eye_of_a_cat
Summary: The truth was that EarthForce didn’t care, and PsiCorps didn’t care, and this was more of a backwater than a frontline.





	Nostalgia Couldn't Take Care Of Its Own

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LiveJournal in 2006. Written for a rare-pairings ficathon where the prompt was: Zack/Byron, pre-series, angsty, without fluff, and preferably with something about Zack's backstory.

The first time Zack screwed up - _really_ screwed up, not the losing-the-paperwork or yelling-at-the-boss kind of screwing up everyone did - he was twenty-nine and on the fast track to a promotion he never got. His CO’s desk was pale wood, pine or something, and he spent that whole meeting staring down at its surface and counting the ghosts of coffee-mug rings as Jorikson said lots of things beginning with "You understand..." and he just kept nodding.  
  
Walking home he went the long way, past factories that rumbled out scrap and workers on the hour into huge junk-filled yards outside. He didn’t notice the noise or the trucks or the rest of it, but whatever they were burning smelled like wood-smoke, and he thought about bonfires when he was a kid and how there weren’t any trees round here anyway. And that promotion, and that future. And last chances. He didn’t sleep much that night, but at least he stayed at home.  
  
The second time was a few years later, and didn’t really count.  
  
He’d got things worked out in the meantime, though. Got a new place in Kelver block, and even though they all used to joke about Kelver having its own waiting list - hey, it’s only six months shorter than the waiting list to get posted anywhere else but here! - it wasn’t so bad. He had his own kitchen, where he reheated a lot of stuff that probably tasted better cold, and a sofa with a bust spring, and a blurry mark on the wall where someone’s kid had drawn a boggly-eyed cat with green ink that never quite washed out, not that he tried too hard. The new guys probably still joked about Kelver, but they didn’t do it around him; he was a long-timer now.  
  
The warning about the dust came two weeks after the dust itself, by which time they’d already had two murders and one stupid kid left crazy and screaming at walls in the hospital. It talked about military secrets and protected information, and added a few lines on addiction and mortality rates like some school health-class vid - _Dust is dangerous, kids! Remember, two minutes inside someone else’s head can cost you a lifetime inside your own!_ They’d always got lucky with dust before, maybe because they were way out nowhere or maybe because dust did to your wallet what it did to your mind and anyone who could afford that could afford a ticket out, and the new guys - recruits right out of basic, half of them - jumped on it like it was the second Minbari War. Jorikson rolled her eyes, put Zack in charge of the rookies, and got on with making sure the civilian cops weren’t tangled up in the whole business again.  
  
The note she left on his desk said "Play it safe," nothing else. He didn’t need it explaining.  
  
Sometimes, after days like that, he’d end up dreaming about the old times. Never on normal days, when everything was rolling along like it always did and his life went wake, eat, work, file reports, keep an eye on the rookies, try to find a witness who’d come forward about anything ever, home, vid, sleep, because those days he could get through like a wheel in a groove; just the others, the days when he could kid himself he was getting somewhere and doing something. He’d wake up with smoke in his eyes and the flick of cards on a grainy table in his ears, and his mind clinging on to the satisfaction of a good hand slotting together. Sometimes he shook it off by the first coffee; other times, it hung around the whole day, feeling like a twisted muscle in his memory.  
  
The first morning of the major dust operation, the rookies looked more enthusiastic than they had for months, and maybe he’d have got caught up in it right along with them if he’d been any younger. They didn’t know that EarthForce sent the same form memo to anywhere dust might be an issue, and they didn’t know that dust junkies weren’t together enough to sell secrets and weren’t sane enough to get hired for it. They’d all been here long enough to know how secrets worked in this place, too, but it looked like that hadn’t clicked either, so he just let them go on believing they were _on the frontline of the war against espionage!_ or whatever else the memo said.  
  
The truth was that EarthForce didn’t care, and PsiCorps didn’t care, and this was more of a backwater than a frontline. He guessed at some level they knew that, anyway. Let them take what they could.  
  
This, obviously, was before the Psi Cop showed up.  
  
Zack was suspicious at first, because suspicious had a good track record when it came to weird things like anyone important being sent out here, and an actual Psi Cop was about the weirdest yet. (Plus, he’d seen bloodhounds hunting down a rogue once on Io, and even fifteen years later they gave him the creeps.) "We weren’t counting on Psi Corps taking much of an interest in this one," he said.  
  
The Psi Cop smiled, a strange, distant flicker of a smile that snapped back to efficiency in a heartbeat. “If we had the resources, we’d investigate every report we received.” And then: "It’s only me. No bloodhounds."  
  
He’d always heard that you felt it when they scanned you, like a tickle inside your mind, but he didn’t feel a damn thing that time and it wasn’t much consolation. "Hey, you get -"  
  
"You were broadcasting your fears very loudly," the Psi Cop said. "And you don’t entirely believe I _am_ a Psi Cop, so why not address both of them at once?"  
  
"Yeah, well, it’s not like you guys come out here often." Jorickson’s office was too hot or draughty or something, as usual, and his jacket was bugging him. He tugged at one of his cuffs. “You want to know about the dust,” he said.  
  
The Psi Cop was silent for a little too long, just watching him. "The dust," he said. "If that’s all right." And smiled, very politely, like a cat changing its mind.  
  
They got flagged up on the next one before the civilian cops: a fight in a bar, at least ten guys armed (although the report said twenty, but, well, you learned to scale down), and someone dealing something new. By the time they got there, the fight was done and the dealers had scattered, and there was just a girl in a blue dress curled up and sobbing in the doorway. Her head rolled right back when Zack tried to move her, and at first he thought her neck was broken, but she was looking at him and laughing and her eyes were fixed on his like vices and -  
  
"Five," she said, "five of hearts and he was dealing from the bottom of the deck I didn’t know and he had the - the - aces and eights like that’s not bad everyone knows that’s bad -"  
  
\- and his head was screaming, she’d raked nails down the inside of his skull, he couldn’t think -  
  
"- aces and I could have I could have just one more would have won it back would have paid it all back it was stupid so damn stupid but the five the aces I could have -"  
  
\- and the pain rolled up to hit him, and he was gone.  
  
Twelve hours in the med-wing, four days at home. Resting. He was off the investigation, not that there was much of it left; they tracked down the dealers later that night. He drank soup and watched a lot of old vids, threw back painkillers like candy, and tried to concentrate on getting right again. Not on the paint flaking off the walls, the same damn cobweb in the corner above the table; not on the blurry green outline of the cat and on the kids that must have grown up in a place like this to draw it. Not on how things were going to go back to normal and how that was going to be it, and how just thinking that made him want to scream. Not on that feeling under his skin, that need to get out to Alfiero’s again and just _once_ , just one last time, get back in his old seat and nod to the dealer, just to feel okay for a while, just to feel alive again.  
  
He went out for a walk when the walls started getting too close, and even though he told himself he wasn’t going to make any stupid mistakes, he found his feet taking him back that way. The sun was setting huge and yellow behind him, the tyre tracks in the dirt were half-full of water that shone back gold, and it was beautiful, and he tried telling himself that was going to be enough.  
  
"That’s a fast recovery," the Psi Cop said, suddenly two feet away, and Zack could have sworn he was better at watching his back than that even doped up on painkillers. "Your mind must be extremely resilient."  
  
Apparently not that resilient, since "You’re still here?" was all he came up with.  
  
"Observing the trial. My mentor considers the unlicensed use of telepathy to be a particular subject of interest." There was something wrong, though, about that and about everything, and he realised that for all Jorikson’s cynicism nobody ever checked back with Psi Corps. You just saw the badge and the uniform, and -  
  
"You’re not wearing gloves," he said.  
  
"I wanted to feel the sun on my hands." He smiled again, that distant, creepy cat-smile, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit him any more, as if it was someone else’s smile and he couldn’t quite get it to match his face. "You people," he said, "you’d graft those to our skin at birth if you could, and tell yourself it’s to keep you safe."  
  
"Look," Zack said, "hey, look," but you couldn’t really argue with someone who could hear your thoughts, and what he was thinking was _the gloves do keep us safe, that’s the POINT, and he says he’s a Psi Cop and -_  
  
"You don’t believe me, do you?"  
  
"You came here alone," Zack said. "Psi Corps never told us you were coming. We never asked them to send you. You’ve got the uniform, and then you walk around without the gloves, and you talk like, I don’t know, like you’re waiting to get found out."  
  
"I do?" he said. "Yes, I suppose I do." And he laughed, and sat down with his back pressed against the rusting steel sheets that made up a wall behind him, suddenly human. "I’d make a terrible rogue."  
  
"Yeah, well." Zack shook his head. "There aren’t many rogues with Psi Cop uniforms."  
  
"Surprisingly few." He pulled a pair of black gloves out of his pocket, tugged the fingers on one the right way out. "I can put these back on if you want," he said.  
  
"It’s okay," Zack said. "I mean, you’re right. It’s not like they do much."  
  
"They inspire fear," the Psi Cop said. "Although they shouldn’t be a substitute for manners. I assure you, I won’t scan you."  
  
It was, Zack reflected, probably the strangest conversation he’d had this year.  
  
The Psi Cop folded his gloves up neatly, like he wasn’t used to doing it. "What happened to the rogue you saw on Io?" he asked. "The one being chased by bloodhounds."  
  
"I don’t know. They caught him."  
  
"They always do."  
  
"He was screaming."  
  
A long, long silence. "I don’t understand rogues," the Psi Cop said eventually. "To break away from the Corps, to cut yourself off from your own people? The Corps is all we have."  
  
"Yeah," Zack said, "well."  
  
"To feed us, to clothe us, to teach us. Protect our bodies, train our minds. Correct our mistakes." A sideways glance. "Pay our debts."  
  
He should have guessed. "You want to hold that over me like it’s some huge secret, you just go ahead, okay? Everyone knows. _Everyone_ knows. Maybe it’s a big deal wherever the hell you come from, but out here the rules don’t work that way."  
  
The Psi Cop held out one ungloved hand, somewhere between a halt and a surrender. "So I’ve gathered."  
  
"So, what, you think I’ve got something to do with the dust? I screwed up that time so I must be mixed up in everything that’s going on around this place?"  
  
"I was trying to understand why you stayed here."  
  
The sun had already started sinking down, and the night was getting colder. "It’s not like I’ve got a choice," he said.  
  
The Psi Cop got to his feet, slowly, steadying himself with an arm against the wall. "I’m sorry," he said. "I’m... less practiced with normals. It’s only just occurred to me that you were on your way somewhere."  
  
"Just a bar." And because his head still wasn’t working right, because he was used to having someone there to keep him sane anywhere near Alfiero’s, because either way he was going to end up doing something so idiotically stupid that Jorikson would kick him out before he even drew breath to explain it, "Coming with me?"  
  
Later on, long after the bar closed, he thought maybe it wasn’t about any of that at all. Maybe it was just about wanting something and being able to say it, and not pretending you were okay with a life where you never wanted anything, not a new post or Tuesdays at Alfiero’s or this. Psi Cop or not - and he’d stopped trying to work that out, because it wasn’t like things made any more sense either way - he knew why it was a bad idea, and he knew what they said about telepaths and what they could get you thinking, and he didn’t care. He wanted this, and sometimes wanting was enough.  
  
It had been a long time. He’d forgotten the feeling of someone else’s hair tangled between his fingers, the salt taste of someone else’s skin. He guessed some things worked differently for telepaths (or, hell, he _knew_ some things worked differently for telepaths, otherwise dust would be a whole lot less popular), but most seemed to work the same, and his body remembered what his mind didn’t. It took him a while to work out that the words he heard weren’t spoken out loud, and by then he’d sunk so deep into the sensations echoed with them that each _please_ and _yes_ and _closer now closer_ sounded just the same anyway.  
  
"Would you live out your life here?", the telepath asked him later, casting his eyes over the cobwebs and the old sofa like they were museum exhibits. "Your whole life, and not even try?"  
  
_You did scan me_ was Zack’s first thought, until he remembered half a bottle of whiskey and the early hours of the morning. "I don’t get to leave until I get another post," he said. "I don’t get another post until someone gives me a chance, and I don’t get a chance until hell freezes over. Word gets round."  
  
"And you’re so sure?"  
  
"Like my mother always said, there’s a fine line between ambition and stupidity."  
  
The telepath laughed. "The glorious fault of angels and of gods," he said. "Try again."  
  
Zack, sobering up by this point, figured he’d just concentrate on not getting fired for a while and see how that worked out.  
  
It wasn’t about thinking you could win. He tried explaining that to Jorikson all those years back, and didn’t do too well at it, and then spent a while thinking it over himself and didn’t do too well at that either. It was something about the rest of it, the way your blood started burning when a bluff paid off, the way you felt like the only thing ever missing was one more twist, the way you forgot your life and your job and everything else because you felt so damn alive that the rest of it was like sleepwalking. And, sure, you _did_ lose, and you kept losing, and you ended up owing money to the sort of people you should be arresting and then you spent three nights wide awake staring at the walls because you couldn’t do what they wanted but you couldn’t pay it back - but even if you knew all of that, you’d still carry on heading towards it.  
  
That was the past, though. Sometimes you had to keep hold of a safe hand, and he’d taken too many chances to expect someone else to waste one on him.  
  
It wasn’t about thinking you could win. He kept telling himself that.


End file.
